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Mary Fickett, a Pillar of ‘All My Children,’ Dies at 83

Mary Fickett, who acted in theater, film and prime-time television before becoming a legend among followers of the daytime drama “All My Children” as Ruth Martin, a nurse unafraid to speak her mind, died on Thursday at her home in Callao, Va. She was 83.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter, Bronwyn Congdon, said.

On Broadway Ms. Fickett played Eleanor Roosevelt and replaced Deborah Kerr in “Tea and Sympathy.” She also joined with Harry Reasoner to host a CBS-TV morning news and entertainment show and appeared in a movie with Bing Crosby. But for three decades, she was best known as the pillar of a popular soap opera.

In 1973, she won the first Emmy presented to an actor for daytime drama when her character gave an impassioned speech against the Vietnam War, considered a bold move on conservative daytime TV. She received Emmy nominations as well for an episode in which her son was missing in action and for another in which she was a rape victim.

In the emotional and sexual roller coaster of soap operas, Agnes Nixon, creator of “All My Children,” juggled the conventions of the form with her mission to explore deeper issues from new perspectives. To do this in the context of a fictional small town, Pine Valley, required central characters who would, like the matriarch Ruth, embody stable values.

Photo

Mary FickettCredit
ABC, via Photofest

“There has to be some core around which other people disintegrate and come together again,” Ms. Fickett said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “If the place were in chaos all the time, you wouldn’t have some place to bounce off of. They’ve had problems — Ruth was raped, and she had an affair — but viewers want to believe there is a core.”

Mary Fickett was born in Buffalo on May 23, 1928, and grew up in Bronxville, N.Y. Her father was Homer Fickett, who directed the radio series “Theater Guild on the Air.” She attended Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and made her theatrical debut on Cape Cod in 1946. She studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater under Sanford Meisner, and joined the Actors Studio, where she studied with Elia Kazan.

In 1951, The Boston Post praised her performance in “The Petrified Forest” at a theater in Falmouth, Mass., saying that she balanced “almost cold self-possession” with “romantic aspirations.”

She first came to the attention of Broadway playgoers and critics in the mid-1950s in Robert Anderson’s “Tea and Sympathy,” for which she won a Theater World Award as a housemaster’s wife at a New England school for boys who becomes attached to a student.

Her next Broadway role was as Eleanor Roosevelt in 1958 in “Sunrise at Campobello,” Dore Schary’s drama about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s adjustment to being stricken by infantile paralysis. She received a Tony nomination for her portrayal.

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Ms. Fickett and Ralph Bellamy in the play "Sunrise at Campobello," which ran on Broadway in 1958 and 1959.Credit
Photofest

Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, described her evocation of Eleanor as “nervous, unkempt, all wife and mother in the beginning, but acquiring a sense of style and decision in the later scenes when she serves as her husband’s prophet.”

Ms. Fickett found steady work in television in the 1950s and ’60s, appearing in “Armstrong Circle Theater,” “Kraft Theater,” “The Untouchables” “Have Gun — Will Travel,” “Naked City” and other series. She also appeared in daytime dramas, including “The Edge of Night.” Her movie work included the 1957 film “Man on Fire,” in which she played Crosby’s ex-wife.

“Calendar,” the morning show with Mr. Reasoner, ran from 1961 to 1963. Ms. Fickett often got the interviews Mr. Reasoner refused, like one with the man who caught the ball Roger Maris hit for his 61st home run.

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She was in the first episode of “All My Children” on Jan. 5, 1970, and continued regularly until 1996, when she left to take care of her sick husband, Allen Fristoe. She returned in 2000 to appear in occasional episodes.

Ms. Fickett’s first two marriages, to James Congdon and Jay Leonard Scheer, ended in divorce. Mr. Fristoe died in 2008. In addition to his daughter, she is survived by her son, Kenyon Congdon; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

ABC has canceled “All My Children,” because of what it calls “changing viewing patterns.” The last episode will be shown on Sept. 23. The network will dedicate the Sept. 21 episode to Ms. Fickett.

A version of this article appears in print on September 13, 2011, on Page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: Mary Fickett, a Pillar of ‘All My Children,’ Dies at 83. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe